The Young Learner: I'd say rook to a7 on move 25... was a waste. black should have better guarded his pawns, and he focused on the worng one. The weak pawn was the c pawn. there was different things he may have done, but I consider playing 25...Bd7
-Andrew Heidemann, age 16

Sneaky: Ra7 looked very awkward to me too. But that's the problem with a bad position... you end up making awkward moves to hold everything together.

I can't see any good alternative to 25. ...Ra7 though, everything I think of loses a pawn one way or another.

This is the problem with the Tarrasch defense. You either end up with an isolated pawn, or if you manage to protect it, you have a backward pawn. Advocates of the defense claim that the isolated d pawn is really a good thing, as it confers a mobility of the pieces in the middle game. All to often though, Black winds up simply a pawn down.

LordPerkinzle: 7. ...cxd4? (Black takes too soon) 10. ...Be7? (Wasting time as Bg5 is not even on White's agenda)
11. Na4! (Makes Black lose a tempo and prepares c5 for the Bishop)
13. ...Bg4? (Easily refuted)
14. f3! (Makes Black lose another tempo while preparing the Rook for Rf2
18. Qd4! (Excellent spot for the Queen as Black no longer has a dark-squared Bishop to chase her away)
19. ...Rec8? (Black continues to waste time, unsure of where to put his pieces)
20. e3! (A two-purpose move. Prepares to bring the Rook to c2 and gaining a discovered attack on the Queen at b5)
24. b4! (Threatening to break open the c file for White's doubled Rooks)
27. Rxc6! (Offering an exchange of Rooks that not only gains a pawn but brings White's Queen to the 7th rank)
38. b7! (There is no way for Black to stop White from Queening withoit losing the Queen: 38. ...Qa7 39. Qd8+ Kh7 40. b8=Q)

tamar: Everyone who plays the Tarrasch has the nightmare of being defeated in this simple fashion. At least it seems simple now. At the time the Tarrasch was thought to be too complex to tame. Rubinstein thought it through completely, the line-up of ♗,♘,♖,&♕ on c5, exchanging off any offensive black piece, and finally crushing resistance with multiple threats to the a and c pawns.

Gypsy: The earliest game here with the (g3 Bg2) Tarrash line is Bird vs A Clerc, 1878; and it was nicely handled by Bird, indeed. Vidmar vs Spielmann, 1908 is also one of the early one's. And then there seems to be nearly a dozen of early games with this variation by Marshall. But these guys get no billing--injustice, I tell ya. :-)

tamar: <Gypsy> Marshall played 6 g3 a lot during this period, and pretty successfully, just judging from a brief Opening Explorer tour I just took.
But he was more likely to get sidetracked into a tactical adventure than Rubinstein or Schlechter.
The worse case scenario is when Black just has no tactics, as in this game, and all his pieces are glued to his weaknesses.

Octal: The Chernev explanation gave me a slightly better understanding of Nimzovich's blockade. Blockade your opponents pawn center (with preferably a knight or a bishop), and you opponent will struggle to centralize their pieces and gain space, while you will be constantly be pushing them back, obtaining more space, and make all of your pieces more centralized.

The former book states that 3-4 of Rubinstein's moves could only have been made by an exceptionally deep strategist. Two of those moves, in fact, are when he played Pf3 followed a few moves later by Rf2. Those two moves look rather amateurish at first glance, but they're not---not by a long shot !

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